


Water Ghosts

by parhelions



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Historical, M/M, Pre-Relationship, vague noises: the three kingdoms period
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:27:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29248791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parhelions/pseuds/parhelions
Summary: Doyoung finds a missing soul. Taeyong is less of a nuisance than expected.
Relationships: Kim Dongyoung | Doyoung/Lee Taeyong
Comments: 7
Kudos: 75





	Water Ghosts

Winter in northern Goguryeo was a special kind of hell, Doyoung decided. He'd cursed every layer he put on that morning, and he cursed them now, soggy with frost, trailing dead leaves. The sleet drove needles where the scarf flapped from his face. Gray land, white sky. 

The way up the mountain wound through steep ravines and ice-slick ponds, up to a temple perched on a cliff. In the distance, he saw hunched shapes trudging along, pilgrims and vagabonds and thrillseekers. It was said the harder the journey, the more the heavens tested the will. The worthier the end. 

The gods were probably pissing themselves laughing.

"Praying or watching?" the climbers had asked at the start of the hike.

Doyoung had given them a faux shy smile. "Watching."

His goal wasn't the temple but the ring of stone huts beside it. The latest intel placed a former general, exiled—for bungling a poisoning, for fomenting a coup, the accounts varied—cozy in the hearths. Unless he had become a pious man in the past three years, he was sidling up to the shaman in charge for less scrupulous reasons.

Out of the whiteness, the temple loomed: pitched roof, bare beams of timber. Inside, a clump of people huddled before a fire. All nine monks, clad in homespun. It was an open secret that they were deft with fire, apostates hiding from the crown. Amateurs across all three kingdoms flocked to their teachings. They scorned systems of knowledge, claiming that rigid schooling stifled the holy gift. That the royal mages were no more than pampered pets.

Though the new era of whispered names like Lee Taeyong's had changed more than a few minds.

He flicked ice from his cloak. _May the dead find rest._

Feeling for the heft of his knife, he retraced his steps to the huts, picking the locks. He rifled through drawers and pantries, lifted floorboards. Stale candies. Feathers. More than a few love letters. Nothing damning. Maybe piety had found the disgraced general after all.

"Hello?"

Doyoung snapped to the corner, knife drawn. A mistake. He hadn't been vigilant enough.

"Can you hear me?" the voice called again. It sounded like someone talking into a glass. "You have the gift, right?"

He flinched. A mage could tell another mage, and one had every advantage against him now if it came to a fight. Dusk was falling, the shadows long and spindly. No one came forth.

"The teapot," the voice said impatiently. "I can smell citrus. Or sense it, I suppose." 

Another step, then another. The house remained still. On the kitchen table, in the semidarkness, sat a bowl of fruit: peaches. An apple. Mandarins, in a splash of color. 

A teapot, tiny silver vines twined up its side like lace. 

*

"You're lucky I didn't smash you to pieces," Doyoung grumbled. "I should've run when I had the chance."

"I'm glad you didn't," the teapot babbled. The mare whickered, tossing it a suspicious look. "I'm not a demon, I swear. Cast any purification you like."

 _I'm not a mage,_ he thought, but held his tongue. He blamed it on the fatigue of the trek, up then down, the past nights shivering in the open air. He didn't think he was at the point for sleep-deprived hallucinations, but there was a first time for everything. "Sounds like the exact sort of thing a demon would say."

"I'm not, though."

"Saying it louder won't make it true." 

From the last house he filched a bundle of letters, carrying out his mission as intended, talking teapots be damned. As the shaman and his monks braided their lightning, the audience gasping in delight, he picked his way down the crags.

"What are you doing?"

Doyoung sighed. He finished scrawling out the message to Jaehyun and unfastened the saddlebags. "Work."

"We should be moving south. There's a bridge beyond the woods, if you take the hill pass." 

"Ah, is that where you laid your trap?"

The teapot harumphed. "For the last time, I'm trying to keep your head from rolling. But fine. Ignore me all you like."

Doyoung glared. He didn't know if the teapot could even see. "The monks were busy, and the supper table was loaded, last I checked." Rice wine he'd dusted with powder, cabbages he'd smeared with tonic. "The shaman will have a full house of sleepy drunks tonight."

"Interesting. You're not a meathead mercenary, at least. Wait, _wait_ —"

Doyoung lifted the teapot and nestled it into one of the saddlebags, lined with his spare change of clothes. In the glow of the lantern, the celadon glaze was even, thin, pale jade spanning from spout to handle. The vines caught in the light. It was something belonging in a noble's house, not in this sprawling wilderness. "Feel comfortable in there?"

"Surprisingly, yes." Then, as if catching itself ( _himself?_ ), "You're...helping." 

"As far as the border," said Doyoung. "We'll see if there's more when the time comes." And, with luck, receive orders to take this matter out of his hands. He stowed away the rest of the baggage and swung onto his horse, slipping through the pines.

The sleet and snow ceased. Moonlight dappled the road.

 _One of the best men I'd ever known,_ Gongmyung had said.

The funeral had been a prolonged affair, thick with bonfire and burning incense. Slain at the tragic age of twenty-five. Posthumous honors, presented by the queen herself. A procession of a thousand soldiers, mage and swordsman marching shoulder to shoulder in time.

It took three days to believe him.

*

"Huh. You're not a mage."

Doyoung glanced up. "I never said I was."

"You let me believe it, though."

"Your fault, not mine."

His parents often joked that Gongmyung gobbled up all the magic in the womb. It used to sting. Doyoung had watched his brother float stones in the palm of his hand and melt sand on the dry creek bed behind their home, standing with the rest of their village as the gilded palanquin arrived, bound for Seorabeol.

"Going to report me?" he asked lightly. While he'd inherited a sliver of power, it wasn't nothing. Low enough to let him fly under the radar, but the laws stood.

"No." Taeyong snorted. "Considering that you hold my literal life or death in your hands, I'd rather not try you."

"A wise decision."

He flipped the eel on the coals, letting the smell waft to where the saddlebag laid open. His things would reek of grilled fish for weeks to come, but Taeyong, who couldn't eat or drink, insisted. A month, he'd been trapped in that musty hut.

"Why didn't you, though?" Taeyong asked.

Doyoung knew what he was getting at. "I barely have anything."

"You could've honed your power, though. Training builds on what already exists."

"And spend the rest of my life bound to the king? No, thanks."

"You're already serving him, though. You're an intelligence officer - one of Lord Moon's crows."

He groaned inwardly. Leave it to Taeyong to discern his true profession while missing half of his senses. "Even so, I have more freedom than you all, contained in the court like that. I don't have to wait for orders to do something I think is right." 

Taeyong paused. "What do you think is right?"

"I meant in the practical sense," Doyoung said. Suddenly, he wondered what Taeyong's eyes were like. Their shape, their shade of brown. "What is this, philosophy school?"

"Gods, no need to be snappish. Are you one those people who gets mad when they're hungry?"

He listened; the amusement brimmed in Taeyong's voice. 

*

On the lowlands beyond the Nakdong River, two armies clashed.

A battle that began at dawn raged through the night. Wards shattered; foot-soldiers fell. Mages dropped from sheer exhaustion and were trampled on by the infantry. 

A battlemage had enough still to send out a deluge. He'd wrung rain from the clouds and froze the front lines, extinguishing the burning valley behind them.

Now, Taeyong told Doyoung how his nose bled, how two soldiers, children, really, had propped him up so he could summon. Around midnight, a serpent of sizzling flame had burst through the defenses and taken aim. The magic arced off a shield, went awry. Hot waves of pain, then he'd glided out of his body and sank into the celadon teapot of a washerwoman on the other side.

"Everyone says you're a hero," Doyoung blurted, just to say something. He wanted to hit himself.

Taeyong gave a humorless laugh. "Big help that gave me." 

Memories flooded him; parrying naked steel, climbing over broken earth. Intelligence had horrors of its own, but it suited him far better than open battle. He crumpled a fallen leaf in his hands.

"The thing is, I don't know if it was the reaction to my spell or not," Taeyong continued. "It could have reacted to the mage beside me, or to the enchantment on the shield. Or something else entirely."

"Will the mages in the college know?"

"I keep hoping."

At a creek, Doyoung watered his horse and peeled an egg for breakfast. Taeyong dictated a note to jot down, dense musings on second-order enchantments and energy signatures that had him scrambling for the correct characters. Then Doyoung took a damp cloth to the teapot, carefully ridding it of smudges and stains. Taeyong sighed in contentment. 

They traveled late into the nights. Doyoung shivered in his flesh while Taeyong goaded him. They kept one eye trained on the horizon between shifts. When it snowed for two nights he rented a room at an inn and bathed. They forded a river and water soaked through the saddlebags, leaving Taeyong spluttering. 

It was the most surreal journey Doyoung had ever been on.

After convincing the washerwoman that the teapot was cursed, Taeyong had been thrown in a collection of communal camp dishware. A stint in a dusty wagon, then a cloistered life in the back of a storeroom where an actual demon possessed a pendant and kept him entertained for a time. At last, an merchant purchased him as a gift for the alpine temple. 

It had been six months.

He recounted this in the same flat tone. Doyoung choked his brain for something to say, anything, and came up empty. He was a stranger. Taeyong had endured the unimaginable, and endured it still. He had no hand to hold, no shoulder to touch.

*

Captain Jeong Jaehyun met them on the border, the fog shrouding on his lone figure. Doyoung had written him the vaguest details, how he'd found a possessed artifact while carrying out his planned mission. To his credit, Jaehyun appeared unruffled, patient.

In the warded privacy of his tent, Doyoung took Taeyong out.

"It's a honor to meet you, captain," Taeyong greeted. In a way he was trusting Doyoung, an assassin, a spy, for being his eyes and mouthpiece. But he had few choices.

"And I, Battlemage Lee," Jaehyun said. He concealed his awe with a polite tilt of his head. "You are well, I hope."

"I am. Please forgive me, as I cannot bow."

A camp mage inspected Doyoung for glamor, and, finding none, stalked off. He and Jaehyun wedged the teapot in a basket of reeds, stuffed with wool. Taeyong dozed off in the swaying.

"Do you think he's real?" Jaehyun asked in the mess hall, spooning porridge into his bowl.

Doyoung took the leaflet from his pack, sliding it over. _Exposition of Southeast Streams._ The clerk had tapped Lee Taeyong's name on the cover and muttered a prayer under his breath. "He recited the first two pages verbatim."

Jaehyun hummed. He gave the book a cursory flip, pausing on a page crowded with symbols. "I know little of magic, but—can a ghost memorize a script?"

"A few." In his bones Doyoung believed him, but knew better than to rely on it. Taeyong—or the soul—had an artlessness that drew the beholder in. He was nothing like the pompous mage-generals he knew.

In the morning, a scroll arrived from the capital: Doyoung would accompany the teapot further south, all the way to to the capital. Jaehyun saw them off with fresh horses and an armed guard, to which Taeyong stayed silent the entire week. Doyoung found himself missing his jokes, his odd flakes of unwarranted information. In the desolate north, he'd felt like a friend.

Seorabeol was as he remembered, flat clean squares of cobblestone, painted pillars, sloping hills. At the college of magic, a small gathering waited: gray-bearded professors, the archmage and his attendants, swathed in embroidered robes. Yuta, a Yamato air mage, stood amongst them, and Doyoung relaxed a fraction. Someone Taeyong knew.

They whisked the teapot away. 

Doyoung declined invitations to lunch and left for his quarters on the canal, prickly in his own skin. He attended a meeting with Taeil, garnered praise on his heap of letters. They drafted plans teetering on the edge of discombobulation. Across the table, a young minister of finance, who Doyoung had liked for months, smiled with his teeth.

It was evening by the time the dispersed—fly from the nest, as they said. He pretended not to hear someone call after him and wandered the streets alone, buying himself a plate of doughy chicken at a stall. Flakes of snow spun and melted on the warm earth. He looked to the spires of the college, gone silvery in the mist, and thought, _What if._

*

In Baekje, the winter was mercifully mild. An apprentice with a nearly too-cherubic face for killing met him in the shadows of the palace, and they took to their element, mapping the aging fortifications, befriending the eunuchs. He smothered a prince in his sleep and raised another in the bid for succession.

On the way home, plum blossoms budded on the trees. There was a rumor that Lee Taeyong did not really die on the lowlands but was walking among them now, alive.

*

"I miss having skin. And drinking. And chewing."

"All those things are overrated." Doyoung cleared a stack of books to unearth a seat. "Have you ever broken a bone?"

"No, surprisingly," Taeyong said. "I did fall down a cliff once, but there was a lake nearby so I—never mind."

"What? Is it bad?"

"Not exactly. I only—digress."

Upon arriving home, Doyoung had found a scrap of paper pushed under his door in Yuta's looping handwriting. It was, in fact, Taeyong trapped in the teapot, he wrote, except they had no clue of how to dislodge him. _He'd like to see you._

Taeyong's room was a plain, tidy space sheltering a dozen plants, plump and curling, and snails crawling in a glass tank. In the daytime, the room had no shortage of guests. Students, faculty, and soldiers on leave read to him, debated his notes, filled rolls of paper with spiraling potion recipes and incantations to try. Doyoung took to visiting in the evenings.

"—and while we're all in shock, the soldier helps me up and...asked if he could see me again. Seriously, a near-death experience and his first thought is _courting_."

"Maybe he saw your face and fell in love," Doyoung said, relishing in Taeyong's grumble of embarrassment. "That devastating a suitor, huh?"

"...A little."

"No reason not to have confidence. Unless—" Doyoung let out a mock gasp. "Were— _are_ you ugly or something?"

"Excuse you, I still have all my teeth," Taeyong groused.

"I bet you didn't."

"Show your hyungnim a little respect, gremlin."

"Fine. You have all your teeth, but some of them are pointy, like a bear's."

"Why are you like this."

Doyoung smiled, though Taeyong couldn't see it. He leaned back in the chair, watching a snail pace across the terrarium. A book on the nightstand. A robe splayed on the quilt. Taeyong must have left it, the night before his regiment moved out. He had had every intention of coming back.

"It's your robe," Doyoung explained, sensing _what are you doing?_ on Taeyong's tongue. The garment opened in a fall of linen. He judged they were about the same build, unless Taeyong liked his clothes a little baggy.

"Looking at my nightwear already, aren't you?"

"Ha, ha." Doyoung sat down once more, feeling out of sorts. A living, breathing person had been in this room. He plucked strand of hair on the collar of the robe. "I was curious what you look like. Besides the extremely vivid picture of a mouth with healthy teeth."

Oblivious, Taeyong laughed, the sound cupped in the teapot. "Fold it for me, will you?"

*

His ashes resided in a squat copper urn, embossed with phoenixes. Doyoung took it from the muddy crypt beneath the city and hid it, at Taeyong's request. Though he suspected it had something to do with the recent fervor, the overeager mages striving to prove themselves, he didn't press. He had loose floorboards of his own.

"I heard he was quite handsome," Youngho said one afternoon, taking a sip of tea.

"Is it good to be gossiping about the dead?" Doyoung deadpanned.

Youngho shrugged. His broken leg was propped on a pile of cushions between them. "It was a compliment. Besides, since when were you the superstitious type?"

It was early March; sheets of rain and wind rocked the teahouse. A slew of wounded soldiers and mages had limped through the thaws for the healers and comforts of home. More than one person stopped by to shake Youngho's hand, murmuring _I heard about Nakdong, I heard about the Sobaek._

Idly, Doyoung noted the designs on the porcelain sets, the swooping branches and cranes. 

Youngho, being Youngho, noticed. He nudged Doyoung with his good foot. "I heard you rescued him yourself, all the way from a snowbank. It's the stuff for the storybooks."

Doyoung rolled his eyes. "Sure, change me into a prince riding a cockatrice, and it'll be all set."

Youngho pouted at his reticence. "Going to make me work for it?"

"Yes, actually." Between the palace and the college, no one had permission to confirm Taeyong's life in a teapot, but tongues wagged. _Better to not let them have hope_ , the archmage explained, an odd tightness to his mouth. _Just in case._ The eastern Lees in the aristocracy dutifully mourned their lost heir, still.

"We discovered that the summation of spells doesn't have to be linear, they can be quadratic," Taeyong said by way of greeting that night.

"I think you're talking to the wrong person."

"I don't. I'm in a fidgety mood, and I wanted to annoy you."

"Many thanks," Doyoung said dryly. He eyed the divination charts on the desk, inked in turquoise. A gory drawing of a human heart was tacked to the wall. "Any closer?"

"Perhaps." Doyoung imagined him gnawing the inside of his cheek, tapping his fingers. _Which one?_ "We are alone, correct?"

"Right."

"And you have my ashes."

"Yes—what are you thinking?"

Taeyong clamped down. "Nothing. Just making sure."

Doyoung took a seat at the desk, propping his chin on his hands to be eye-level with the teapot. "What's going on in that head of yours?"

Taeyong made a weary noise. The gap for a shrug. Not for the first time, Doyoung wished he had a hand to hold. "Too much, and not enough." He "If the time comes, if another soul possesses me—you have to destroy this vessel."

Doyoung closed his eyes. Thought of evenings and days and nights without Taeyong's voice, his wit, his laughter. It rang with emptiness. "I will."

Taeyong's response was swift. "Thank you."

Silence. Doyoung pressed his fingertips to the celadon, willing for Taeyong to know he was there, from whatever plane of existence he was in. _More ashes for the urn_. Forcing his voice to lightness, he said, "Tell me more about the summation of spells." 

*

Doyoung went to Hanseong, Kaya, sailing across the sea to the court in Chang'an. He played the parts they craft for him, donned the costumes and bowed his vowels or curved his consonants with ease. The faces of the kings blurred, and a thousand rose up for one he did not know. 

In May, he fell in with the minister amongst the crows. He spent many a night in his lover's manor, a frisson of silk sheets and heated kisses. He sampled sumptuous dishes in a polished hall. They gave each other roses, wrote love letters in cipher. 

His friends teased him. Taeyong teased him. But he held Doyoung too tight at night, walked aloof past him in public, sneered at his servants. At last, he announced his family had promised him to a wealthy heiress, and Doyoung walked away.

Between postings, Doyoung visited the college. He slipped into classroom and spent half an hour sweating under bright lamps to view a fern collection Gongmyung had told him about. He wandered into a lightless rotunda draped in velvet and glowing with stars. He ate in the communal area and saw a chair and thought, _Did Taeyong sit here?_

_Did Taeyong look out that window?_

_Did Taeyong listen to that lecture echoing in the halls?_

*

A year to the day after the battle on the river, Yuta banged on Doyoung's door, out of breath. "You have his ashes, don't you?"

Doyoung touched the sheath of his dagger. "Who's asking?"

"I am," Taeyong spoke up. He was cradled in Yuta's robes.

While Yuta lit candles on his kitchen table, Doyoung boiled ginseng on the stove. Shouts skimmed over the bridge. He peeked out and saw mages, in their crimson ensignas, filing along in threes and fours.

"They're searching the crypts," Yuta explained, not looking up from where he hunched over the fraying tome he brought.

Doyoung shut the curtain. "The archmage is?"

"Who else? He's been jealous since we were in school. Ever since their first duel and he got knocked on his ass."

Doyoung had gathered as much whilst eavesdropping on the terraces, making discrete inquiries in the ranks. A man with a grudge. A genial water summoner with a competitive streak. Judging by Yuta's dripping hair, they'd escaped on the cusp of ruin.

"I thought it was just a friendly rivalry." Taeyong said glumly. "If it weren't for your warning, it'll be markedly worse."

"Don't thank me yet." Yuta dog-eared a page. "You're certain about this incantation?"

"Certain as I can be," said Taeyong. "I'm happy with it."

Wordlessly, Doyoung retreated to his bedroom, where he unlocked the panel and dug up the urn. He held it up to the lamplight; the phoenixes were always ironic. He slipped outside and filled a bucket with well water, to which he poured the piping ginseng tea and sprinkled salt into it, as Taeyong asked. Yuta crouched to ink a verse of poetry on the sides.

"Never thought I'd feel my human remains next to me," Taeyong mumbled, the bucket placed next to him on the floor.

"Besides the whole teapot thing?" Doyoung said. His palms were moist with sweat. The shouts had quieted; they were underground, searching.

"Besides that, yes."

Yuta eyed the two of them. "Any last words?"

"Have a spare garment ready, I don't want to be _naked_ —"

Despite himself, the chilly fear lashing his limbs, Doyoung cracked a grin. They were in his room again, bickering. "Who has mismatched priorities now?"

At the count of three, Yuta unfolded his arms and launched into the incantation, leeching the air of its warmth. Hours crawled by. Doyoung sat in the chair, robe in his lap, waiting, not looking away.

*

The room smelled of tea. The fragrance soaked his clothes, his bed, looped around his drapes. Gray tendrils of smoke coiled out the open window. 

Taeyong slumbered under the blankets, limbs askew. 

Doyoung jerked awake in the darkness. As the sun rose, he scraped the molten wax from the floor and mopped up the puddles. Yuta, weary-eyed but triumphant, had left after Taeyong was tucked in, promising to herald the breakthrough. By dawn, crowds gathered before the college's marble gates, led by the Lee clan. They stood stock-still in garish robes, swords at their hips, saying nothing. No one was in mourning.

By six, the news roused the palace atop the hill. The king's edict was swift: depose the archmage, round up the pretenders, elect another. Bestow every protection on the teapot, if it could be found. Patience.

The fragments laid at the bottom of Doyoung's dustbin. The copper urn was empty. Ashes mixed with ginseng and water, magic upon magic, had brought Taeyong back, rebuilt limbs and organs imbued with lifeblood.

Doyoung glanced at the clock, then at the sleeping boy in his bed. He was easily the prettiest person he'd ever met. Dark eyes that widened as they took in Doyoung for the first time, slender arms that wrapped around his shoulders, drawing him close. Pale—too pale—lips that formed rasping _thank you_ s, parting in an _o_ as he'd tasted honey and tea again. His voice, no longer contained in clay. His fingers, trailing vapor.

 _Don't leave,_ he'd said, eyes already fluttering closed, wrapped in Doyoung's robe. He would need to see the king soon. He would need to eat more, drink more, take slow steps back into health and magic. 

_I live here,_ Doyoung had shot back. A funny warmth had slid down his chest.

They had time. They would have time. 

**Author's Note:**

> i would love to hear prompts/suggestions for dotae/johnjae - or just to make friends as well !!
> 
> [tumblr ask box](https://parhelias.tumblr.com/ask)


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